Checkbox Survey

Pros

Cons

Expect to invest time learning the intricacies of Checkbox Survey's more powerful features.

Bottom Line

Checkbox Survey is an online survey tool that lets you customize just about everything related to survey design, making it easy to dash off a simple questionnaire as needed.

19 Oct 2018

In a field of "SurveyThis" and "SurveyThat," "Checkbox" sounds like a refreshing change of pace built by a crafty, disruptive online survey tool startup. Actually, Checkbox Survey (which begins at $450 per year for the Basic plan, billed annually) does evoke a different personality, but it's far from game-changing. In fact, the idiosyncrasies begin with actually getting to your account, which cannot be accessed via the company's checkbox.com website, but rather, relies on a unique subdomain at checkboxonline.com. Signing up for an account also requires that one agrees to communications from Checkbox, including "sales and marketing announcements for Checkbox Survey products and services." Though a good tool, Checkbox Survey doesn't win our Editors' Choice award for this and other reasons. Instead, the Editor's Choice designation goes to competitor Qualtrics in our online survey tools review roundup.

Survey Design

Once an account is established, Checkbox Survey seems like it was designed with the goal of minimizing use of scrolling as much as possible. That's not such a bad thing when tools such as SurveyMonkey, SoGoSurvey, and others can involve a lot of moving up and down for long questionnaires. Indeed, Checkbox Survey's main navigation panel does a solid job of presenting an overview of a questionnaire in a minimal amount of space. It may not provide the bulk-edit mode in SurveyGizmo, but it also doesn't require going into as detached a "mode" as Toluna QuickSurveys' "Organize" screen to get an overview of a questionnaire.

Other consequences, though, aren't as desirable. Checkbox Survey is kind of an "anti-Qualtrics" when it comes to editing a question in place. It is the only tool I looked at where questions and answers are entered on separate tabs. Creating a matrix question yields seven tabs, including Appearance, Behavior, Columns, Conditions, Question, and Rows. Things are so compartmentalized that the first tab, Preview, is needed just to see how the final question will look. That's just too much work for something constructed dynamically in other tools.

Checkbox Survey includes about a dozen editable styles for surveys that differ mostly in color scheme, but the product offers an exceptional level of control over the appearance of items on the screen. For example, it is the only tool I looked at that exposes the ability to add HTML for any answer choice (and in many other places), and it has granular alignment controls for how objects in rows and columns appear. It also offers more freedom to customize text in the survey taker's experience than I saw in other tools.

The product is also particularly flexible in designing matrices that can include mixing and matching radio buttons, checkboxes, and text fields in a single row, but doing so requires using a complex, multistep process. Also, the tool lacks support for some of the more media-centric question types as heat maps. Checkbox Survey has robust support for branching/skip logic and display logic ("conditions" in its lingo). However, its Rules editor can present options that are, at best, confusing, even compared with the facilities in other less polished user interfaces (UIs) in Outside Software eSurveysPro and WorldApp KeySurvey.

Speaking of WorldApp KeySurvey, Checkbox Survey also includes several features that make it attractive to security-minded enterprises. These include support for multiple administrators with discrete levels of permissions at the survey, report, or folder level. It also includes the ability to set up email triggers on certain events such as a survey completion or a response to a specific question, which can be helpful for tracking compliance. It doesn't integrate a collaborative task manager like WorldApp KeySurvey does. However, its Users tab reveals an audit trail of activities in the application that let you quickly jump into whatever changes were made. This is a standout feature that could prove invaluable for troubleshooting design issues.

Reporting

Survey fielding and report creation are both driven through setup wizards. Fielding capabilities include the ability to limit access to surveys with passwords. The Report Generation wizard offers the advantage of specifying what kind of charts should be universally generated from certain kinds of questions in advance. However, after Checkbox Survey generates a report, it's essentially a static, on-screen printout that offers nothing beyond printing or exporting individual charts as graphics or exporting the whole thing as a PDF file. There's no ability to run filters or crosstabs on a report or change it in any way for that matter, which is a major feature found in most other packages. This is not to say your data is an island; Checkbox Survey separately provides exporting to SPSS and other formats and a host of features via its application programming interface (API). Access to the API requires a higher pricing tier, as is true for many other offerings.

Pricing

Checkbox Survey's pricing structure is relatively straightforward. There is no free version beyond a trial, which includes all of the features of its Basic plan. That option, which costs $450 per year, delivers a strong value that includes a high percentage of its functionality.

From there, the pricing takes a jump that is steep, but it seems to be justified in additional added features. The Professional version adds a higher number of emails per month, phone support, multilingual support, (API) access, and team collaboration for $1,750 per year. Adding a custom domain and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance almost doubles that price to $3,450. The company also offers custom enterprise pricing and a version that can be locally hosted as an alternative to its Amazon Web Services (AWS)-hosted version.

Final Thoughts

Checkbox Survey packs a lot of power, and it's a strong choice for companies that demand a high degree of customization over the look and feel of their online surveys. Checkbox Survey's Basic pricing plan represents a good value, but its question design process makes tapping into the tool's full power cumbersome, plus its reporting feature is simply not competitive. Checkbox Survey also recognizes that its UI needs work, so the company says it is planning an overhaul that's due at the end of the year.

About the Author

Longtime tech industry journalist Esther Schindler has translated geek-talk into English since 1992. She loves to explain how technology can, indeed, improve the quality of life. Find her on Twitter at @estherschindler. Bring chocolate. See Full Bio